The Exciting Game of Career Girls: Rebecca
Then: Writer/actor/veterinarian/human rights advocate. Now: Suicide prevention.
Name: Rebecca
Grade-school era: 1970s
What did you want to be when you grew up? Why?
In elementary school, I wanted to be a writer or a veterinarian, or maybe an actor. And I wanted to travel the world, spend a lot of time in nature, and live overseas.
Why? The vet is the easier bit to answer – I loved animals. I was obsessed with dogs and horses, we had a dog, I had riding lessons for several years, and l loved books and TV shows about animals; this was the era of the James Herriot vet books and hit TV series, and the part of Yorkshire where the stories are set is all of 45 minutes’ drive from my childhood home. So it was relatable. [Ed. note: James Herriot seems to have factored into a lot of both UK and US girlhood career plans!]
The writer– well, I suppose my earliest heroes were mostly writers. I fell in love early and hard with words. I remember reading Kipling’s Just So Stories at age six, and loving the words and the images they conjured, the poetry in his prose (I still do, despite his views). My favourite author was Arthur Ransome, who wrote books about camping and travel, and I just wanted to be off – to see the world. Also, I started learning French and Latin age 7, and unusually for that time and place, we holidayed abroad in France or Spain most years, so I had early exposure to speaking and hearing other languages, and a facility for picking them up that lasts to this day.
I also loved being on stage. My dad had me performing poetry recitals and public speaking in competitions as young as about 4 or 5, and I invariably won; I was good at it, and in plays early on, too. But it never occurred to me that acting could be a career.
As a teenager, my social awareness and conscience kicked in. It was the eighties, the era of Thatcherism and the introduction of rampant capitalism in Britain, and I decided I wanted to work in human rights, public policy or education when I grew up – as a lawyer or teacher or journalist. I still wanted to travel and live overseas, but I very much wanted to do things that made the world a better place. And I still wanted to be a writer (by which I meant a novelist), but it seemed really difficult to do that as a job. [Editor’s note: CAN CONFIRM.]
What did you actually grow up to be, and how did it happen?
First, a word about the things I didn’t do. As a teenager doing things like eyeball dissections in biology, I quickly ditched the idea of being a vet as too gory (now I look back and realize it would have been fine if I’d stuck with it, but 14 year old me and 54 year old me have different experiences of bodies). And when I went to university, I became too insecure about acting to keep at it. I also never became a lawyer or journalist, though I did teach for a while in my 20s, in Japan, and I’ve had corporate training roles in several organizations.
I actually started my career in the UK in public policy, though I stopped that when I emigrated to the US. Once I was here in the US, I flailed for a while because nothing quite translated and I wasn’t sure what to do or how to find the right job; in the end I fell into an entry-level customer service job at Amazon that I was seriously overqualified for, but it worked out brilliantly for me. I stayed for years, had multiple jobs and promotions, and gravitated to roles leading training, editorial, communications and business policy – all of which tied very closely to those teenage interests, albeit without the human rights component.
Later on, after some time at home raising my kids, I got involved with advocacy work, initially through the PTA. In 2015 I co-founded a political action committee and spent several years leading campaigns for public school funding and tax reform in Washington state. [Ed. note: It’s hilariously Amazon of you to join the PTA and wind up founding and running a entire PAC.] I did a lot of public speaking in those years, and a lot of speech writing for other people – another common thread with my early years.
When I was ready for a change, I decided I wanted to work on mental health issues, because so many people I knew and cared about had struggled. Now I run communications and marketing for a suicide prevention group. And I still see the common threads: language, words, writing, public policy, and working on complex social issues to try and “make the world a better place”.
Did you have role models (in real life, pop culture, movies, comic books, whatever) for the job you wanted to do? Were there people who tried to help you prepare for your dream job? Were there people who discouraged you?
Real life writer role models? Hahahahaha. No. I had several teachers, both in elementary and senior school (the UK equivalents of middle and high school) who enthused about my writing, but no one ever said “You know, you could be really good at this, and there are careers – real ones – that you can have from writing.” And when I floated it, the message from my parents (and teachers) was a very cautious it’s very difficult to have a successful career in the arts, so much of it is luck; far better off getting a proper job in a steady and predictable field.
What I did have was a strong extended family with a lot of civic duty on both sides –magistrates, founders and chairs of local charities, school governors, lay preachers. Both men and women. For example, my mum started the youth club in our town, and a social/support group for young mothers, and both thrived for decades afterwards. A great-aunt was a magistrate until her 70s. Another worked in leadership for the biggest employer in the region, and was a world traveler in retirement; we later learned she’d been a Bletchley Girl in her 20s during World War II. [Ed. note: That is so badass. I loved visiting Bletchley Park.]
What did the phrase “career woman” mean to you as a kid? What did it mean to live a career woman’s life?
Feminism came late to the North of England, and consequently there were no “career women” in North Yorkshire in the 1970s. None that I knew of, anyway. Most women were married with children, and stayed home once they became mothers. The “career woman” archetype wasn’t something I was aware of until I was a teenager in the first half of the 80s, when Maggie (Margaret Thatcher) was Prime Minister, and then it meant polished professional woman in 1980s power suit with shoulder pads, heels, and a briefcase, working in a position of power in a bank or law court or the government in London. And who (obviously) didn’t have children.
I went to a private all-girls school, and even then, for girls in Britain, the career options were pretty limited. The top-of-the-class academic girls were encouraged to do A levels and apply to university and go on to “careers”. For everyone else, there was (in descending order of school hierarchy): teacher training college for elementary school teaching, which was considered to be inferior to an academic degree; nursing, which you did as an apprenticeship, usually starting at age 16; or secretary. To this day, there is massive overrepresentation of nurses and teachers among the women I went to school with.
Did your mom [Editor’s note: or mum!] have a job outside the home? If so, was that unusual in your world, or was it common for women to work? What kind of messages did you get from your mom--and/or your dad--about her job?
Like many of her generation, my mum left school at age 15. She was a hairdresser from 15 to 28, and stopped working when she was married and pregnant with me, her oldest child. Because of their combined incomes and the fact that my mum was working, my parents were paying more in taxes than she was earning, so there was no financial advantage to her continuing to work; that was actually a deliberate government policy meant to drive married women out of the workforce, because leaving to raise children was seen as the correct thing to do.
She never went back to paid employment, though she did a fair amount of volunteer work. When I was about 12, she thought about going to college (which in Britain is the equivalent of community college) and retraining. But then she had another baby, and by the time my brother was old enough that she would have felt comfortable venturing back out there, I think she thought she was too old.
Both of her sisters had jobs, but they were jobs, not careers, and her sisters worked because they were more working-class than our family and needed the money. And I had a great-aunt who after World War II worked for ICI, a ginormous petrochemical company which was the biggest employer in the region, ending up as their head of women’s personnel. (That says a lot, doesn’t it? That they divided the personnel department by employee gender?). But even she stopped working when she got married, even though she didn’t have children.
In retrospect (and even at the time I thought this), it would have been good for my mother to have worked, even part time, to have had something for herself. But it really wasn’t done in that generation and class, and it would also have been very difficult because my dad was a self-employed lawyer who was gone from 7 am to 7 pm every day. He would not have been able to work the hours he did if my mum hadn't been home to take care of everything else.
So the message I got from both my parents was: work hard, be responsible. But also: you are blessed with a good brain, so don’t waste it. I’m the first woman in my family to be educated past the age of 16 and it was impressed on me (mostly by my mum) that I had a duty to myself and others to make the most of the educational opportunities that she and other women hadn’t had. I stayed at home for a number of years when my kids were younger, and I felt a lot of guilt about that, and a lot of anxiety about falling behind in my career (which I definitely did, and I’m still working through that now).
What advice would you give your kid self about her dream job?
Go for it – you’re probably a much better writer than you think, and you don’t need to overthink this; if you put in the work, you’ll probably be fine. Or in the words of Arthur Ransome, your childhood hero: “Grab a chance with both hands and you won’t be sorry for a might-have-been.”
Honestly it doesn’t really matter that much if you go the civil service route, the
journalism route or the lawyer route. You’ll do well in any of them.
You don’t have to have it all figured out by the time you’re 18! Or 25!
Because actually there is no one specific “dream job”, you could do well in any of a
number, just choose one and go for it.
You’ll know plenty of people who actually ended up in their childhood dream jobs as adults. But by mid-career, all of you, whatever profession you’re in, will be dealing with bureaucracy and administrivia and budgets and difficult colleagues and workplace conflicts, and so on. All of you will have moments of career fulfillment balanced with moments of burnout. Or, in the words of a future boss you’ll have in your 30s “every job has its BS, pick the one with the BS you can deal with.” [Ed. note: this is such good advice!]
Learn what a growth mindset is early on. You’re inherently a perfectionist, but the world isn’t perfect, no one’s perfect, and please don’t spend years agonizing over your lack of perfection, because you’re incredibly capable, more so than a lot of people, and definitely more so than you think. You are learning all the time and that’s as it should be, but you’re not starting from a deficiency.
You have a certain idea about “career” from hierarchies and male power structures and formative messages in the 80s. You and all the other incredibly bright perfectionist girls are going to grow up to be incredibly bright perfectionist women who think it’s all their fault if they don’t get the big promotions, etc, but it’s actually largely systemic, despite the gazillion protestations of “meritocracy”.
Find a mentor after you move to the US, to help you translate your career from Britain to America. This is something I lost when I moved countries and never really found again, and in retrospect it would have helped me tremendously.
It’s not “bossy”, it’s leadership, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
What does your today self want to be when you grow up?
I’m torn between: see if I can go back into a bigger job in tech; work for another start-up (I love start-ups); take my writing more seriously and try to actually submit something for publication; and start my own business.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time this year mulling over something you said on social media at the New Year, Kristi – “My wish for you is that you start something this year that will last for 25 years”, or words to that effect. There are things I’ve worked on that have had long-lasting impact (though of course you never know in the moment which things those will be), and I would like to do that again, though perhaps with a little more self-awareness and intentionality next time.